You’ve done a great job with your Creative Cloud apps. We love the new features, and the new Creative Cloud installation process is worlds better than the old Creative Suite installer. We’re excited about your new direction with training videos, versioned backup, and Typekit font sync. It’s great.

But that hasn’t kept everyone happy. Every time we write about Creative Cloud, our readers let us know how the new subscriptions plans don’t work out for them. Even if they like the new features, they’re not planning to upgrade because of price, or because they want to know that they’ll be able to keep their programs forever. They’re frustrated enough that they’re signing petitions to get you to change back to the old Creative Suite style.

That’s why we’re writing this letter. We think you’re onto something good with Creative Cloud — but you need to go just a bit further to make everyone happy. We think there’s a way to make everyone happy, or at least almost everyone, so here’s the idea. (more…)

We’ve just closed our giveaway, and would like to extend our congrats to the random winners: dion, freshrolls, and Alex Leung! If you still want to pick up a copy of the bundle, there’s one day left to get it.

Looking for some summer sales on Mac apps? Our friends at StackSocial are running their iStack 3.0 Bundle this week, with over $500 worth of apps for your Mac for just $29.99. It includes Corel Painter Lite — a great digital painting app with 97 brushes, Voila — a great Mac screenshot app, MoneyWiz — a beautifully designed app to keep track of your finances, Tuneup — a great tool to keep your iTunes music organized and cleaned up, and more.

Best of all, we’ve got 3 copies of the iStack 3.0 Bundle for our readers! Just leave a comment below and let us know what app you want most out of this bundle to enter the giveaway. Then, share the giveaway on your favorite social network, and add an extra comment here with a link to your post for an extra entry in the giveaway.

Hurry and get your entry in; our giveaway closes on Tuesday, July 2nd.

Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.

We all were expecting iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 to be announced at WWDC, and perhaps were hoping to see some new hardware, but no one predicted that the Mac Pro would get such a radical overhaul this year. Sure, Cook promised us that Apple hadn't forgotten pro users, and the old Mac Pro was the most outdated Mac Apple was still selling, but many of Apple's biggest fans and most popular developers had already given up on Apple doing anything interesting with the Mac Pro. The 27" iMac is beautiful and powerful anyhow, and Apple had already killed off the Xserve, so it didn't seem too much of a stretch to think that the Pro was next on the chopping block.

Boy, were we wrong. Apple absolutely had not forgotten Pro users, but instead was quietly building a fully redesigned Mac Pro that looked like nothing before (well, other than perhaps R2D2 with a bit of Darth Vader's style. Or a trash can. Or a Cray, if you squint.). With up to 12 cores on its CPU and two GPUs built in and designed to be used directly for computing power, the Mac Pro new in the way it works internally, as well. It's built to let you, as Apple says, edit 4k resolution video while live-rendering effects in the background. It can take up to 128Gb of Ram — or at least may, based on Apple's OS X Mavericks documentation.

Its only drawback for pros is that its not designed to be upgraded and expanded internally, relying instead on Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3 port for expansion. That, and the lack of dual CPUs, has some pros wringing their hands, wishing Apple had kept the upgradable design of the former Mac Pro.

What do you think? Is the new Mac Pro the True Mac Pro Successor that John Siracusa wished for, one that's for the computer industry what halo cars are for the automobile industry? Or is a computer that's already irrelevant, either by its lack of expandability or its inherent tie to the past of desktop computing?

It would be fair to say that only one photography app can even claim to be king of them all – Instagram. Despite its daft requirement for images to be square, and its quirky filters – to give them a sympathetic description – it has revolutionized the way we share images, and has rapidly risen to be one of the most popular social networks in the world.

What makes these achievements even more remarkable is that this is a mobile-only platform, and for some time, it was an iOS exclusive too. Until Instagram’s surge in popularity, no other network creators had the bare-faced effrontery, let alone the skill and nous, to go mobile only. Facebook‘s recent $1bn acquisition of Instagram only highlights the brilliance of the people behind the app.

Whilst all this mobile stuff is very forward thinking, many of us have wished, over the years, for the ability to play with Instagram on a larger screen – on a computer, in other words. The current web-friendly version of Instagram’s website is the closest we’ve ever got to an official desktop environment, so it is little wonder that independent developers have stood up to fill the gap.

One such developer, FIPLAB, has created InstaReel for Instagram, a $2.99 native Mac Instagram browser. Without image uploading – the critical part of the Instagram experience – though, can InstaReel truly be better than just using your phone? Time to find out…

Your email app is one of the most important apps on your Mac, since email is likely the main way you communicate and collaborate with your colleagues. But all email apps aren’t created equal, and while there’s many out there, they all don’t include the features you need. Postbox 3, our sponsor this week, is the email app you need to try if you haven’t found one to fit your needs yet.

Postbox has tight Gmail integration, including support for Gmail labels and important message indication, but it also works great with any other email service you want to add. It’ll organize your emails into conversations, let you Quick Reply inline in your emails, find your contacts’ avatars from social networks, and let you save messages to Evernote or send larger attachments with Dropbox. Postbox will even make your more productive, with a favorites bar that’ll let you quickly access the folders and labels you access most, and more. Best of all, it’s integrated with the best Mac features, including full screen and trackpad gesture support.

Postbox is more than just a normal email app. It’s team describes it as a “a system for managing your life”, and with its social network integration, advanced search, dedicated views to help you find images and attachments, and more, it’s an email app that can help you stay productive and keep your inbox at Inbox Zero without leaving anything behind.

Give Postbox a Try Today!

If you haven’t tried out Postbox recently, and are looking for a better way to keep your inbox in check, you should definitely give Postbox a try. You can try Postbox for free for 30 days, and then buy your own copy of Postbox for just $9.99. You just might find that Postbox is your new favorite email app.

There’s Markdown writing apps, and there’s rich text editors. Then there’s Ulysses III, the app that combines the best of both into one of the nicest writing environments on any platform. It looks sharp and works great, and I use it for a good portion of my writing these days — something I never would have considered back in the days of Ulysses 2.

Recently I had the chance to talk to Max Seelemann from The Soulmen team, and was able to arrange an interview with him about his team and their work. Here, for your reading pleasure, is their thoughts on OS X Mavericks, iCloud, building the best apps for each platform, and the story behind how Ulysses III came to be.

Macs haven't come with iDVD years, after not getting any updates in Apple's iLife '11. You can still burn data DVDs from Finder and audio CDs from iTunes, but if you want to make a movie DVD with a menu, scene selection and more, you'll need to find another app. And even if most of us just upload our videos to YouTube and Vimeo these days, it's still nice sometimes to have a home video on DVD to share with family and friends.

That's where iFunia DVD Creator comes in. It's a full-featured app that helps you create the movie DVDs you want. You can import all of your videos, add subtitles to your tracks, create a menu using the included professional menu designs, and burn them to disk. It'll even help you add basic touchups to your videos before you burn them if you'd like.

iFunia DVD Creator usually costs $39.95, but it's on sale this week for just $6.99. But even better, we've got 10 copies to giveaway to our readers for free! Just leave a comment below and let us know what you'll be using iFunia DVD Creator for to enter our giveaway. You can also share our giveaway on your favorite social network and add a second comment here with a link to your post for an extra entry.

Do you love your Mac, but still prefer using an Android phone? Or perhaps do you have an Android tablet but a Mac and iPhone? It’s more common than ever these days to use a number of different operating systems, and thanks to cross-platform apps and cloud syncing services, it’s also easier than ever to get them all to work together.

Our sister site Android.AppStorm has put together a roundup of the best tips and tricks to get your Android devices working great with OS X and iOS. Take a few minutes and jump over there to see how you can get all of your devices working together they way they should anyhow.

There’s opensource freeware software, the bundled apps that are essentially free with your Mac, dirt cheap apps on the App Store, and incredibly expensive apps like AutoCAD and Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. And everything in between. You could spend nothing on software, ever, if you really wanted to, and use just what comes on your Mac and other free apps you could download. Or, today, you can spend a fairly small amount and get quite a few really good programs, with the wealth of apps on the App Store today.

On the other end, though, even as apps seem to be getting cheaper, there’s more in-app purchases and subscriptions that’ll eat up your money. You’ll find yourself paying to unlock that feature you really wanted, or subscribing to Office 365 so you can collaborate with people at work. Or, you’ll pay for an Evernote subscription after you find it so useful as a free app.

We’ve all got different budgets for software, and we’re wondering how much you usually spend. Think of all your software purchases and subscriptions, and let us know about how much you spend per month. I’d personally be somewhere in the $20-$50 range, but then, I buy a lot of software for testing and more. Where are you on this scale, and has that gone up or down over the years? We’d love to hear more about your app spending in the comments below.

When you put your photos online, you run the risk of someone stealing your work and claiming it as their own. Trying to protect your digital copyright can be quite a headache. The simplest way is to add a watermark to your images, but with most image editors you’ll have to do it individually, one image at a time. That’s why you need Visual Watermark, our sponsor this week.

Visual Watermark is an easy-to-use professional watermarking app that incluedes over 10 integrated composite watermarks, 250 built-in fonts, an interactive Watermark Designer, and more. You’ll be able to design unique watermarks, preview how they look on your pictures, add it to all your pictures at once, then save it for future use, all in a modern UI that makes it straightforward to use.

Visual Watermark is designed to work great with your Mac. You can import iPhoto libraries directly, or drag-and-drop your own images into the app. Its photo editing algorithms are optimized for speed, so it’ll only take a few seconds to process all of your photos. Then, it makes it simple to publish your photos online, with automatic downsizing to the resolution you want when it adds the watermark to your images.

Get Your Copy of Visual Watermark Today!

Best of all, Visual Watermark won’t cost you much to use. You can get your own copy of Visual Watermark starting at $19.95, with a 30 day satisfaction gurantee. Get started today and see why thousands of photographers, designers and bloggers worldwide have chosen Visual Watermark.